Posts by alien anthropologist

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Re: Oracle Universal Installer...

If you want to look at an enterprise ADF application, look at https://support.oracle.com - Oracle's customer support site (valid CSI needed to logon).

This used to be Flash based. The ADF version is a lot slicker.

As for blaming SQL-Developer as a "bloated slowcoach" - how about backing that up with evidence? Am a CLI fan myself and prefer SQL-Plus. Have used SQL-Developer (and have it installed), and find it no different that other SQL GUI tools (like TOAD, Tora, etc).

Re: disease

AC said:

" Well, no, I was actually meaning the poster who pretty much suggested that the only way forward is to nuke everyone who doesn't share his convictions. Interesting responses though, when you consider I was suggesting that a middle ground would be best for everyone."

It was a a tongue-in-cheek verbatim quote from the movie Aliens - where this was a suggestion on how to deal with the problem they faced.

If you take the rod out of your backside, you may realise that the meaning behind this quote is that there are no real solutions to religious fanatics and fundamentalism. From the bible belt in southern US, to the Middle East.

There is no "middle ground". And that is not my opinion. That is what these fanatics are saying and are demonstrating - by killing innocents bystanders (like the 8 South Africans in Kabul).

Re: Nice Marketing Blurb

> Oracle's the same (ish). Big download just to get a driver. Bah!

Untrue. Oracle InstantClient download is small and does not even need to be installed using a traditional installer. See <http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxsoft-082809.html> for the x86_64 Linux driver download.

@kevinclosson.wordpress.com

See www.oracle.com/us/products/database/exadata/database-machine-x2-2/overview/index.html for the statement quoted.

But the actual core number comparison aside. How do you scale I/O on a 80 CPU SMP server with processes on each of the 80 cores hitting the I/O subsystem?

The I/O layer needs to scale with the number of cores and increase I/O demands. And that is what Exadata does by distributing the I/O across multiple storage servers and using QDR Infiniband as fabric layer.

This is not about Exadata specifically. This about scalability. SMP does not scale as well as MPP in cases like this. With a MPP architecture the I/O fabric layer can be scaled from QDR to higher speeds. The storage servers PCI flash caches can be increased. More storage servers can be used for striping data. Etc.

With a single SMP h/w box - how do you scale? How do you for example add additional PCI busses or increase PCI bus speed? It becomes a large and expensive doorstop that cost even more to replace...

Marketing Speak

"For Exadata products, the 1 million IOPS is typically achieved using multiple 'storage server' units. Our performance was achieved using single server with multiple FlashMAX cards."

So they ran a single Oracle instance on a 80 core server? And then that is compared to an Exadata Database Machine? How?

The path between CPUs and local I/O bus is a lot shorter than Exadata's path from CPU over Infiniband to a storage server and via a s/w layer through PCI flash to spinning rust. Yet, Exadata is faster!

80 cores is a lot more than the typical Exadata Database Machine. A full X2-2 rack comes with eight 2-socket database servers. Significantly less cores.

This is a traditional SMP versus MPP comparisons - that is almost always skewed as the architectures are drastically different. Of course, that does not stop sales from their marketing speak and bullshit.

The bottom line that a single 80 core NEC server provides LESS I/O scalability and performance than a much smaller (core wise) Exadata DB Machine. WTF are they going to do if the Oracle database processing scales across all 80 cores and do some serious I/O? Which is WHY you want distributed storage servers in order to provide the scalability for the I/O fabric layer.

NEC is seriously missing the point on how to use Oracle and how to make a database scale. SMP is not it. Been there. Done that. MPP is. Been there and still am using it.

Mankind to the stars

"Red dwarfs? That's the shitty part of the local neighbourhood.Your probes are likely to be jacked and stripped for parts by local alien minorities."

And that is what mankind will take to the stars. Prejudice. Racism. Hatred. And wait till a local earth boy falls in love with an alien chick and starts banging her... KKK? Evangelical Christians? Fundamentalists? Taliban?

You ain't seen nothing of how truly fucked up mankind is...

Here's hoping that your species never set foot outside your solar system.

So the question has been answered...

Lemme guess...

Libra is written in Java by a bunch of Javaheads, followers of The Faith of Java.. that (as usual) have not a fricken clue about relational databases and data modeling - and did not design the system to add up metrics across entities...?

I've lost count how many Java fails like this I've seen. But then reasoning and logic are lost causes when dealing with Javaheads - as one would expect dealing with religious zealots.

Huh?

So JA is the sole guilty party in all this? Not Manning? Not US military security (or lack thereof) that allowed a private to access and download classified stuff? Not the newspapers that too gladly are publishing the material? Not Joe Public that want to read all about it?

Or on a deeper philosophical level, not the society you have that consists of borders and distrust and dirty secrets between (so-called) sentient beings that share the same damn friggen dna and pale blue dot in this universe?

And then you, using the handle zen, which implies a deeper and balanced and spiritual understanding, blame the bullet for the killing. That is quite pathetic. But not surprising as far as your species go...

WTF?

> And all the information about this is contained in Oracle RDBMS to which you need to run a SQL report created by an Oracle process to get at it

Huh? What an ignorant statement to make.

The client supplies the SQL source code. Be that BO, Cognos or whatever BI or reporting client system used. An Oracle server processes "compiles" the SQL code into a cursor and executes it. The output which is then consumed by the client process.

Standard client-server. Standard architecture used in RDBMS systems.

Or did you simply want to raise the bar of the definition of an El Reg commentard?

@Peter2: denying write permissions to the folder

> Is this too difficult?

Yes. What do you (aka the kernel or file system driver) use as ACL to determine that process foo may have write access to a specific folder? How does it determine that process foo is foo and not its notorious cousin, fubar? Keep in mind that creating a signature for process foo will fail when foo itself is updated. What about advance user Johnie that wants to use process screwup to access the folder and make some manual mods and changes?

@Stewart McKenna

Cannot recall the last time I had to do sysadmin (Linux) or sysdba (Oracle) maintenance on the 12 node one as it simply works.

If it is hard to maintain then the house was build on sand. RAC is only as robust as the underlying hardware enables it to be.

My pet peeve is looking at others building RACs and using 100Mb Ethernet for the Interconnect. Or shared 1Gb Ethernet for both the public network and Interconnect. Or using shared switches for the Interconnect. Etc.

Performance and robustness of such RACs are essentially non existent. RAC is not designed to be run on a "garbage" h/w layer.

@Destroy All Monsters

> SQL is just the crappy insanely dumb query language on top of whatever your database is

What an utterly idiotic and ignorant statement to make.... SQL is not crap. SQL is not dumb. SQL is the fastest method to crunch data on SQL-based databases. And it can scales very well.

Of course - this also depends how SQL is used. A simple thing like using bind variables is often ignored. SQL used as a mere I/O layer like one would treat kernel device read() and write() calls.

That type of ignorant use of SQL... no wonder your application and database performance sucks.

On my databases - runninng a 1000+ SQLs per second is the norm. Not the exception. And there's no way in hell that you could ever get that performance by pulling db data into a client process, crunching it there and ship it (across process and memory and even h/w boundaries) back to the database.

Cheers...

@AC Add it!

> Looks like it has plenty of expansion capability. Drop a Mellanox Connect X2 in there and have fun. Solaris & Linux both already support IB.

In the corporate environment you do not want to build your own storage servers with support for Infiniband as fabric layer.

Yes, we have done it (lab setup, srp targets). But the amount of politics, the type of support/maintenance expected, management 's "aversion" to (utter ignorance of) Open Source, corporate conservatism and so on, are all factors that say , bad fscking idea.

It is many times easier to simply buy a "certified" storage server that has IB (SRP) support.

However.. looking at the market. This is pretty scarce indeed. And then only for highly specialised market segments like video editing. Or horrible expensive products like Exadata for the the Oracle db market.

Which begs the question. Why is Exadata's approach to the storage fabric layer, which is hugely successful, not being used in other (Oracle/Sun) products? Or by other vendors?

And....

..where's the Infiniband and SRP support for storage?

Or is taking (some) of what makes Exadata storage perform so well, not acceptable to Larry as he needs the extra(data) bucks to pay for mistress/golfing buddy salary/avgas for bizzjet/new bizzjet/buying the next America's cup or wtf rich people do with too much money?

Nothing new....

Back in the 90's when corporates, this part of the planet, first got web access it was still pretty much unfiltered.

Worked at a major corporate who had an admin looking at web logs to manage and control Internet access. So porn sites were not blocked - but access seen via the logs and then reported to management by this admin as part of his job description.

The very same admin that told me of what the best of the best bestiality sites were that he found on the net... <shudder>

It can run DOS games...

@Steve Loughran

Oh yeah... I forgot that in today's all powerful and important blogosphere, claims like that in https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/statement_by_the_asf_board1, can be taken as what the legal judgement would be of a court of law, made by one or more (highly qualified) judges.

@Steve Loughran

Your point 13.

If Oracle is indeed not (quote) "meet(ing) its legal requirements" (unquote) ito of providing ASF with a TCK license, then ASF has a legal recourse and should be talking via lawyers in court to the Oracle suits?

As this is not the case (did I miss something in the press about ASF suing Oracle over TCK licensing?), you are in fact blowing smoke up orifices... just as the Oracle suits are...

I have already predicted that..

...Oracle v12 will be called 12c. :-)

8i and 9i = internet

10g and 11g = grid

12c .. = cloud computing

The Oracle database product is just more than a RDBMS. It is a full blown and very able and scalable data processing platform. Have been for many years now - due to assimilating technologies traditionally the domain of the application layer.

Today you can put the entire app layer into Oracle - and it will often perform better and scale faster than using a separate J2EE or .Net app layer... and cheaper. With reduced moving parts that makes everything simpler.

But 11g lacks ito true cloud and distributed computing. Supporting Hadoop and similar technologies... That would be of a major benefit to most/all Oracle customers.

Sure, you may not like Larry and his suits and their approach to Open Source, pricing, marketing and what not.

But that aside, technically Oracle is a damn fine and sexy data processing platform and superior to a lot of other products. It makes evolutionary sense for it to consume something like Hadoop.

Reminds me..

..of being back in town on a long weekend pass a very long time ago. Was a CO (candidate officer) about to become a 2nd Lt.

Ran into a girl I knew from our high school matric class. We started chatting about our old school friends. She mentioned one that is now an officer... the very same guy was doing a NCO course at the same base that I was.

And before I could tell her that he lied, she told me that this guy told her that I was in the special forces.

Hehe.. kind of funny that he tried to cover himself that way.

I told her it was bullshit. Got too much respect for the guys in special forces to claim to be one of them. Served with them (even had one as a company commander). Have family that were in special forces. Takes something special to wear that title and badge - something that most of us do not have.

Or..

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Fail Microsoft.

SOP for employees at that level is 2 to 3 months notice period. When termination of employment is received, that employee's access to the office building is immediately revoked (I have seen them being escorted out of the building within minutes of HR receiving the termination letter). All network accounts of the employee are locked. Allowed into the building once only with a security or IT staff member to clear their desk of personal belongings.

The remainder of the notice period is paid leave - taking the employee out of the loop. And as part of the terms of employment, the employee is not allowed so much as saying "hello" to any of the corporate clients.

Damage that can be caused by that employee going to work for a competitor can be very effectively contained.

Sorry...

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Seems like some did not like my comment that the 1st Amendment is not the one of the best traditions of the US of A... Undoubtedly,. it once was. As the US once was "a symbol of freedom" and the "home to the oppressed and persecuted". Before it started illegal wars over oil. Before it had detention without trail. Before it had extraordinary redition. Etc and etc and etc...

The US of A and many of its citizens have become exactly that which their forefathers feared and fled.

Huh?

"Visual COBOL R3 converts COBOL's English-like statements – the essence that has made the language so accessible for programmers during the last 50-odd years – into files that the machine understands."

Accessible!? WTF!!

This "essence" is EXACTLY what makes COBOL such a shitty language. There is not a single fricken reason to "talk English" to a computer to instruct it. English did not evolve from man-machine interaction. It is a clunky language at best to use to instruct computers. Which is why COBOL is, was and forever will be, a MASSIVE FAIL. Perform varying my ass...

And yes, I have written enough COBOL in the 80's, even re-entrant COBOL (courtesy of transaction monitors), to back this statement up with real experience.

Early DOS attack..

I once accidentally nuked the company LAN. By having a look at what this Doom v1 Shareware thing was* during lunchtime - discovering the multiplayer option and starting a multiplayer game on a colleague's desktop and mine.

I shut it down after a few minutes - and did not do the same on the colleague's desktop. Did not know that the early multiplayer version of Doom used IPX broadcasting. And this desktop was hammering the network hard with broadcasts. Hard enough for our Windows-NT 3 servers (also running IPX stacks - Novel ruled the LAN back then) to choke and die.

* Did a lot of network R&D and development back then, so I had a "technical interest" too in looking at the s/w - and not just being dumbstruck by the awesome graphics of the first real FPS. ;-)

IT angle?

You must be a blind idiot not to see the direct correlation to designing an application that combines hardware and software by utilising resources correctly - and that grabbing too much resources is inherantly dangerous.

It is a perfect analogy for those dumbtards that run multiple Oracle database instances on a single server, imagining that this is somehow better and more scalable.

There are no patriot hackers....

.. but there is a government "computer warfare" department that's getting a lot of black funds via the US defense budget - and they have been waiting for just such an opportunity to flex their muscle and test drive their capabilities...